We have an important misconception to clear up!

We had an email last week from someone who said something about the work/school holidays juggle and how ‘it doesn’t seem to be going quite as smoothly for me as it sounds like it does for you’.

Er, no. Let’s clear this up right away. School holidays and the juggle between work and home are as bumpy in our homes as they are in anyone else’s houses, if not more turbulent at times!

There are days where things flow better, but certainly many days when we ask ourselves if we really have any idea what we’re doing! Here’s how we expressed it in our book:

“It’s not all sunshine. We mess things up. This book isn’t intended to offer an unrealistically upbeat approach with little tolerance for the ‘crunchy’ days that end in tears (our own), when we scramble over the finish line and flop into our beds wondering where the day went and what we did wrong.”

It’s the reason we established the My 15 Minutes program in the first place. We’re intimately acquainted with how challenging life can be, and we created a technique for self-development that we knew could slot easily into lives that may be as messy as our own.

We wanted an antidote to the, “I’ll be happy when …” problem. We knew it was important not to put off our own ambitions (both career and personal ones) until ‘things calm down’ around us. Difficult things beyond our control show no sign of abating, at least in our lives, and we’re not going to wait for that magical eventuality before seizing happiness, growth and connection now.

Our biggest learning in this area is self-compassion. It’s become important for us not to set expectations that are so sky high, we’re paying no regard to ‘reality’. That is not to say we’re not ‘reaching for the stars’. We absolutely are! We’re just working out a way of doing this without sacrificing our health, or our dearest relationships. We really are saying ‘no’ in order to give meaning to our ‘yes’.

And we’re saying ‘okay’ to a bit of school-holiday chaos. We’re letting real life wash over us instead of trying to fight against it, wishing it would go more ‘to plan’. The key to getting through, and getting through with flying colours, is being as flexible as we can, and finding different ways of doing things as we adapt to the ever-changing circumstances within which we find ourselves operating.

And it’s about going easy on ourselves when things fall in a heap, every so often. As they do!

Something to help you escape the chaos for a little while …

Want to read the part of our book that led to us being shortlisted as finalists in a ‘Writing Excellence’ award? Download the free excerpt here. Enjoy!

Emma & Audrey x

About The Author

Audrey Thomas and Emma Grey are productivity experts, authors of 'I Don't Have Time' and its forthcoming sequel 'I Can't Be Bothered', and co-founders of the popular online program, My 15 Minutes. They help busy women reclaim their time and energy around the real-life challenges of modern life.